Portia Aye, sobbin' into the pillow. That sound, that sound, I think hell be a corridor full of rooms like that one with that sound comin' from every one of them, and then you ' d turn on us because we were weaker and smaller than you, but that was nothin' compared with your feeble attempts to love us. We' d sooner have your rage any day! Your hysterical picnics, with your bottle of orange and your crisps -
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Marianne That ' s right, sneer away! I wished to God ye ' d never been born!
Portia We wished it too (Carr, “Plays 1” 217).
Portia wishes that she is never born at all, since entering into the symbolic order of the Father along with gendered roles and social impositions brought by it causes a complexity that cannot be solved. Marriage, as Freud believed, was a great cure to women’s hysteria thus a prescription to prevent hysteria traditionally points to the promotion of the vital role of “marriage and parenthood against drunkenness, promiscuity, illegality, disorder, negligence, and laziness, all behaviors that undermine the family’s goals” (Taylor 205).
Moreover, as Portia poses a stark contrast to this traditional view, her hysteric discourse continues as she loses the grip of reality and talks of hurting and drowning her own children:
Will ya just stop! Leave me alone! Told ya I can't! Alright! I ' m afraid of them, Raphael! What I may do to them! Don't ya understand! Jaysus! Ya think I don't wish I could be a natural mother, mindin' me children, playin' with them, doin' all the things a mother is supposed to do! When I look at my sons, Raphael, I see knives and accidents and terrible mutilations. Their toys is weapons for me to hurt them with, givin' them a bath is a place where I could drown them. And I have to run from them and lock myself away for fear I cause these terrible things to happen. Quintin is safest when I'm nowhere near him, so teach him to stop whingin' for me for fear I dash his head against a wall or fling him through a window (Carr, “Plays 1” 203).
It is true to assert that “Portia’s alienation from her children stems from her inability to identify with the patriarchal concept of the ‘natural mother’ to which all women are assumed to aspire” (Sihra, “Marina Carr” 98). She acts as if she does not know them as the bridge between life and death shrinks in favour of death embodied in the delineation
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of Gabriel’s ghost throughout the play. Portia’s desperate attempt to cling on to life by drinking and flirting with other men is overshadowed by the continuing appearance of Gabriel towards the end of the play where the call for the tragic unity of the twins in Belmont River is intensified. Portia’s conscious mind is conquered by the hysteria towards the end of the second act, and as her conscious psyche is full of hysteric thoughts, her mind is unable to perform a discharge, thus the only way to redeem herself is to give in to the “Sound of Gabriel 's voice, triumphant” (Carr, “Plays 1” 223).
Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan in the original The Dazzling Dark version written in Midlands dialect recounts a folk tale about the Belmont River and how a young woman is blamed for witchcraft, foretelling the future; “If ya lookt her in th’eye ya didn’t see her eye buh ya seen how an’ whin ya war goin’ ta die” (Carr, “The Dazzling Dark” 253).
Apart from her prophetic quality, the woman’s expansive knowledge about nature is also seen as part of witchcraft by the people. She was accordingly subjected to the brutal acts of torture and slow death by townsfolk: “Anaways tha people ‘roun’ these parts grew auspicious of her acause everthin’ she predicted happened. Tha began ta belave thah noh on’y war she perdictin’, buh causin’, all a’thim terrible things ta chome abouh” (Carr,
“The Dazzling Dark” 253). Portia acts almost as a fortune-teller like the same young girl left to die in the folk tale, when she declares in a scene cut from the original text in guessing the imminent death of Gabriel who in a way had the same sort of supernatural purity in him as Melissa Sihra indicates:
In the first edition, Portia foresees the future, like the young girl in the story, in a final monologue which is cut from the later editions: ‘an’ don’t ax me how buh we boh knew he’d be dead chome spring. […] we seen him walchin’
inta tha Belmont river; seen me wud you on our weddin’ day […] we seen ud all Raphael down ta tha las’ detail (Marina Carr 101).
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The story of a young woman who was tortured and left to die because of her instinctive and expansive knowledge of nature, a punishment and correction brought by dominant patriarchal ideology resonates very closely with Antigone’s tragic end in a cave.
Antigone’s premature burial is ordered by Creon who invokes the punishment of Gods against “the awesome throne of Justice” (Sophocles 171) deputized by himself as the new king of Thebes. Antigone had already known that the deed of giving her brother Polyneices a proper burial in defying Creon’s orders would inevitably result in her death.
This prophecy was already foretold by Oedipus who condemned and cursed his children a serving death. In similar vein, Portia knew that her end would be in the liminal terrain of the Belmont River, the same place Gabriel and she made a suicide pact fifteen years ago: “Ah wouldn’t a bin afraid for ah know how an’ whin ah will go down’” (Carr, “The Dazzling Dark” 253). Both Antigone and Portia arguably live on the margins of the symbolic order, kinship and familial ties but they do not only walk on such liminal borders but dare crossing the symbolic associations brought by them, which inevitably result in death as Lacan would argue.
In Antigone’s claim, Judith Butler structures her reading by examining the philosophical arguments on Antigone leading up to hers mainly through the lenses of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Jacques Lacan. Butler tries to understand why they both viewed her death as an inevitable end. Hegel’s argument on Antigone revolves around his dialectical understanding of the necessary transition from kinship to patriarchal state. Antigone, for Hegel, stands for kinship and familial ties, as was evident in her persistence over the proper burial of Polyneices against the orders of the patriarch of the state, his uncle Creon. For Hegel, she not only stands for those ties of primordial origin defining kinship but also the subordination of woman, affections and emotions that will have to eventually give way to the state which is to be associated with reason, power and authority, all male attributions. Hegel avoids from naming Antigone in his analysis
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which is ascribed by Butler to his attempt of generalizing the unlawful deed attributed to all womanhood, which along with the representation of kinship dialectically transcending to state-formation. Lacan’s analysis on Antigone derives from his claim that Antigone bases her seemingly just right to give a proper burial to her brother on an unwritten law, which is only applicable to her brother. This stems from the fact that Antigone has an implicit lust for his deceased brother Polyneices and she does not seem to be having the same passionate love neither for Ismene nor Eteocles. Lacan in his “Seminar VII” on Antigone points out that “It is because she goes toward Atè here … going beyond the limit of Atè, that Antigone interests the Chorus. It says that she's the one who violates the limits of Atè through her desire” (“Ethics of Psychoanalysis” 277). What Lacan calls Atè points to going beyond the symbolic associations of death and living and as Antigone embodies this dangerous terrain exemplified best in lines where she exclaims: “already at birth I was doomed to join them, unmarried, in death” (Sophocles 171). The price for crossing the line, for Lacan, is death:
For Lacan, to seek recourse to the gods is precisely to seek recourse beyond human life, to seek recourse to death and to instate that death within life; this recourse to what is beyond or before the symbolic leads to a self-destruction that literalizes the importation of death into life. It is as if the very invocation of that elsewhere precipitates desire in the direction of death, a second death, one that signifies the foreclosure of any further transformation (Butler,
“Antigone’s Claim” 51).
The limit Lacan speaks of recalls his arguments on the Real which that cannot be confronted and if it is done so, signifying death. Butler does not necessarily associate this limit with the intrusion of the Real into Antigone’s life but as she further emphasizes, this marks a Lacanian “limit that is not precisely thinkable within life but that acts in life as the boundary over which the living cannot cross, a limit that constitutes and negates life
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simultaneously” (Antigone’s Claim 49). For both Antigone and Portia, this limit can be conceived as an escape mechanism from the imposed structures of gendered norms and roles within kinship structure given the fact that it is the language and the symbolic entry into the father’s authority that structure them in the first place. Hysteria can be considered as a way of questioning one’s own social and symbolic identity, an encounter with the Real. In this respect, Portia’s hysteric discourse evident more explicitly in the Dazzling Dark version affirms the intrusion of the Real into Portia’s tormented life in the Lacanian sense, eventually leading to her tragic end. This return to a pre-natal state embodied through psychoanalytical attribution of the Belmont River as the womb functioning as a gateway to self-redemption also marks “the return to an ineffaceable ontology, prelinguistic, is thus associated in Lacan with a return to death and, indeed, with a death drive (referentiality here figured as death)” (Butler, “Antigone’s Claim” 53), evident in the play:
Times I close me eyes and I feel a rush of water around me and above we hear the thumpin' of me mother' s heart, and we ' re a-twined, his foot on my head, mine on his foetal arm, and we don't know which of us is the other and we don't want to, and the water swells around our ears, and all the world is Portia and Gabriel packed for ever in a tight hot womb, where there ' s no breathin' , no thinkin' , no seein ' only darkness and heart drums and touch (Carr, “Plays 1” 222).
Furthermore, Lacan evades calling Antigone’s implicit lustful love for her brother an incestuous love, but as Butler points out, “It is not the content of her brother, Lacan claims, that she loves, but his “pure Being,” an ideality of being that belongs to symbolic positions” (Antigone’s Claim 51). This echoes the pureness of Gabriel who sang beautifully with his heavenly voice as his father recalls the past:
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God forgive me, but times I ' d look at him through the mirror and the thought would go through me mind that this is no human child but some little outcast from hell. And then he ' d sing the long drive home and I knew I was listenin' to somethin ' beautiful and rare though he never sang for me - Christ, I loved his singin’, used stand in the vestry of Belmont chapel just to listen to his practisin ' - those high notes of God he loved to sing (Carr, “Plays 1” 199).
Gabriel represents the ideal self, the self that has gone along with the suicide, which Portia could never possess after witnessing his suicide and thereby she is haunted by his ghost.
To revisit the Lacanian argument on Gabriel as the object of desire, it seems plausible in this respect to assert that “the object [Gabriel as the object of desire] … is no more than the power to support a form of suffering, which is in itself nothing else but the signifier of a limit. Suffering is conceived of as a stasis which affirms that that which is cannot return to the void rom which it emerged” (“The Ethics of Psychoanalysis” 261).
Having acknowledged the fact that both Lacan and Hegel saw Antigone’s end necessary, the former seeing her as standing at the limits of symbolic associations of kinship and family and the latter as merely standing for womanhood and kinship eventually giving away to state-formation, Butler forms her own analysis in contrast to both. As Hegel has “her [Antigone] stand for the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal rule, but also for the principle of kinship” (Butler, “Antigone’s Claim” 1), and to the degree that Lacan also associated her with representing kinship ties, it is concluded that
“Antigone, who from Hegel through Lacan is said to defend kinship, a kinship that is markedly not social, a kinship that follows rules that are the condition of intelligibility for the social, nevertheless represents, as it were, kinship’s fatal aberration” (Butler,
“Antigone’s Claim “15). Even though they both saw the kinship embodied in Antigone as a natural and primal phenomenon before the intrusion of the social, Butler disagrees to the extent that the incest taboo is not only naturally forbidden but also socially considered
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taboo as well. She disagrees with both Lacan and Hegel, emphasizing that Antigone does not stand for all women but as a unique example and though she walks on the borders of intelligibility, she does not stand at the limits of the symbolic associations:
Butler rejects both extremes (Hegel’s location of the conflict WITHIN the socio-symbolic order; Lacan 's notion of Antigone as standing for the going-to-the-limit, for reaching the OUTSIDE of this order): Antigone undermines the existing symbolic order not simply from its radical outside, but from a utopian standpoint of aiming at its radical rearticulation. Antigone is a 'living dead' not in the sense (which Butler attributes to Lacan) of entering the mysterious domain of Ate, of going to the limit of the Law; she is a 'living dead ' in the sense of publicly assuming an uninhabitable position, a position for which there is no place in the public space - not a priori, but only with regard to the way this space is structured now, in the historically contingent and specific conditions (Zizek, “Antigone” 12- 13).
For Butler, the normative structure of kinship makes Antigone’s standing ambivalent. In contrast with Lacan, she believes that Antigone is not driven towards her tragic end by merely thanatos, the death drive but simply a lustful love for Polyneices. Furthermore, Antigone, for Butler, does not stand for femininity as Hegel conceived her. Antigone is not as submissive as Ismene is depicted in the play. She defies orders of Creon and claims a public sphere and unmans him in his vocabulary, appealing to the Gods to justify her claim:
Although Hegel claims that her deed is opposed to Creon’s, the two acts mirror rather than oppose one another, suggesting that if the one represents kinship and the other the state, they can perform this representation only by each becoming implicated in the idiom of the other. In speaking to him, she
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becomes manly; in being spoken to, he is unmanned, and so neither maintains their position within gender and the disturbance of kinship appears to destabilize gender throughout the play (Antigone’s Claim 10).
Butler’s reading points to a liminal standing for Antigone who is in between the submissive femininity supposedly occupied by Ismene and state-associated masculinity by Creon. This provokes further discussion in terms of seeing Antigone walking on the margins of not only kinship but also gender norms. The question of what constitutes gender in the context of Sophocles’ play and its modern implications in Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan, is further explored by our understanding of what kinship ties represent and to what extent they are impactful in shaping identity. Butler points to the performativity of kinship in her book, emphasizing the fact that kinship is “not a form of being but a form of doing” (Antigone’s Claim 58). Antigone does not stand for kinship in its natural sense since the family she belongs to is a stark contrast to the ideal kinship ties:
her father Oedipus is also her brother and she is to be married to her uncle’s son Haemon which would only add to the ambivalence of the family tree. In close inspection, she also never openly admits that she did the deed of burying Polyneices customarily; “I admit it—I do not deny anything” (Sophocles 154). In regards of this ambiguity, Butler claims that “what she refuses is the linguistic possibility of severing herself from the deed, but she does not assert it in any unambiguously affirmative way: she does not simply say, ‘’I did the deed’’” (Antigone’s Claim 10). Albeit less ambiguous, Portia’s ambivalence stems from her liminal nature stuck between the socially obligated roles of motherhood and wifehood and a ubiquitous call for a re-unification in death. Even though she rejects such roles, she still tries to cling on to “life”, observed in the last scene with his husband Raphael; “I cooked your dinner, I poured your wine, I bathed Quintin, read him a story and all. Can't we knock a bit of pleasure out of one another for once?” (Carr, “Plays 1”
222). Furthermore, Portia further reveals another attempt of clinging on to life: “if
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Raphael Coughlan notices me I will have a chance to enter the world and stay in it, which has always been the battle for me” (Carr, “Plays 1” 223). However, Portia only chooses Raphael since he had an angelic name attached to him, a substitute for Gabriel. However, as Portia still lingers on the lost memory of Gabriel and as the world of Raphael pushes her to the edge of symbolic associations, when asked to choose between her husband and Gabriel, she remarks the impossibility of such deed “And you say you want me to talk about ya the way I talk about Gabriel - I cannot, Raphael, I cannot. And though everyone and everythin' tells me I have to forget him, I cannot, Raphael, I cannot” (Carr, “Plays 1”
223). What Gabriel possesses for Portia, a love that surpasses kinship and familial ties, calls for a reunion that is only achieved in death by our symbolic understanding. Antigone possesses a much more ambiguous love since the love gets even more ambiguous when one considers it as a re-exercise of the Oedipal attachment to father in the play. In other words, Antigone’s love is arguably not directed towards Polyneices but to his father Oedipus who is also her brother as they shared the same mother, Jocasta. On the other hand, as Patricia Johnson who attempts to situate Antigone as opposed to Oedipus the father as a point of departure for psychoanalytic criticism, claims, “Antigone transfers her affections to her brothers, and to Polynices specifically in Antigone. When this devotion earns her death, she both laments that death as a substitute marriage, and justifies its inevitability for a child devoted to the oedipal project” (395). Both Antigone and Portia have Oedipal attachments to the brother figure, for the former “Polyneices [represents]
the natal family” (Johnson 393), and for the latter Gabriel is a reminder of the pre-natal, pre-symbolic symbiosis to be found in the womb, and thus, they cannot leave them for conventional marriage.
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If one is to associate Antigone to kinship, for Butler, it only makes sense to see the deed of proper burial as the source of her kinship relationship to her brother. As kinship and familial structures involve a vocabulary of relationships that are strictly gendered, Antigone is in a defiance of normalized vocabulary of gendered roles of family:
in acting, as one who has no right to act, she upsets the vocabulary of kinship that is a precondition of the human, implicitly raising the question for us of what those preconditions really must be. She speaks within the language of entitlement from which she is excluded, participating in the language of the claim with which no final identification is possible (Butler, “Antigone’s Claim” 82).
Antigone is somehow outside of symbolic associations of kinship in its natural sense and as she is not intelligible within the norms governed by them. One finds it difficult to place her in a natural kinship context. She seems to be on the edge of kinship ties as well as the vocabulary of a kinship language that is gendered and structured as norms, she simply does not seem to fit. As Antigone does not appear to be a human but speaks its language as Butler claims, she really posits a very ambivalent character both in terms of her kinship and familial ties and attribution of gender. However, as the literature on Antigone continuously shapes the understanding of what she actually might be claiming, it is only plausible to assert at this point is that she claims for recognition for those that are ambiguous in nature, outside of normativity, resisting social impositions of social categorization, those that are uncontainable like Portia Coughlan. In Portia Coughlan, the titular heroine rejects the familial interiority, ties and roles that are imposed by them.
Portia associates herself with the Belmont River, a liminal gateway breaking through the lands of two patriarchs that serves as a way of self-redemption as Sihra indicates:
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Characteristic of water is its excessive drive to overflow, to transgress demarcated boundaries. The Belmont River is a metaphor for Portia who, like the river, is uncontainable. Carr observes, ‘With Portia I would say, the river is her. It’s her and Gabriel’. The unceasing current of the Belmont River erodes the male-owned farmlands, powerfully redefining the contours of patriarchy (Marina Carr 107).
However, the tragic ending of these heroines begs the question: why do they have to die?
The tragedy of their deaths adds to the sharpness of their defiance, but all the more asks:
Can the ambivalent nature of their defiance still upset the gendered vocabulary of kinship and family that is imposing the roles of motherhood and wifehood on women? Butler questions the future of symbolic impositions brought by the psychoanalytical schema of the Oedipal dilemma for those outside of clear-cut gendered normativity applied to family and kinship:
I ask this question, of course, during a time in which the family is at once idealized in nostalgic ways within various cultural forms, a time in which the Vatican protests against homosexuality not only as an assault on the family but also on the notion of the human, where to become human, for some, requires participation in the family in its normative sense. I ask this as well during a time in which children, because of divorce and remarriage, because of migration, exile, and refugee status, because of global displacements of various kinds, move from one family to another, move from a family to no family, move from no family to a family, or in which they live, psychically, at the crossroads of the family, or in multiply layered family situations, in which they may well have more than one woman who operates as the mother, more than one man who operates as the father, or no mother or no father, with half-brothers who are also friends—this is a time in which kinship has become